Essay
“How do the affordances and constraints of YouTube affect its users?”
Since it’s development in 2005, YouTube has steadily become not only an extremely popular choice for video hosting, but one of the world’s most utilised websites. This is due to its many affordances that encourage users to continue to both view and post content, however, similar to most websites, it does have its own constraints. It is also interesting to compare and contrast these affordances and constraints with other video hosting websites around the world.
There are many reasons as to why YouTube is such a popular video publishing platform across the world. It has many affordances which contribute to it’s success. First and foremost, YouTube is widely accessible for both content creators and audiences. Anyone can create an account and upload almost any video they like, as long as it’s within the standard guidelines. These content creators range from businesses, celebrities, advertisers, and regular civilians. Videos can also be viewed by audiences all over the world, where anyone can watch it. The high accessibility of the site is also due to the fact that YouTube is free of cost.
YouTube affords its users to post content that can be either just for fun, or extremely important. For example, a current trend on YouTube is the ‘make up tutorial’. This is an example of a fun video that people may just watch in their spare time. However the website has also been host to some videos that have sparked worldwide conversation about important humanitarian matters. An example of this is the video ‘KONY 2012’, uploaded by an account named ‘Invisible Children’, which created an international conversation about Joseph Kony’s war crimes and his control of the children around him. The video, five years later has over 101 million views, which are continually increasing.
Additionally, YouTube allows it’s audiences to experience and utilise different affordances that may not be available on other video publishing platforms. Viewers can subscribe to different accounts, and can receive notifications of when they upload a new video. This feature can add a sense of personalisation to somebody’s YouTube home page, as it shows new uploads that the user may be interested in. Similarly, YouTube recommends different videos to different users. Typically, they relate to previous videos that the user has been watching, in order to spark an interest for the viewer.
Advancements in technology over the years have also contributed to the affordances, and in turn success of YouTube. As things such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops have been created and developed, YouTube has been able to expand its affordances. For example, the YouTube application can be used on smartphones and tablets for efficient and easy access to the website. Anyone with either of these items can access YouTube with just one click. Additionally, YouTube allows for embedding on other websites such as blogging websites, and social media platforms such as Facebook. This means that YouTube content can be viewed not only on it’s own website, but also within almost the entire realm of the internet. From it’s obvious affordances, it is evident that some of YouTube’s business objectives are to keep itself accessible, affordable, and effective.
As discussed, YouTube is the largest video sharing website online with over a billion users, however with all it’s affordances it does not come without several constraints. The first major constraint comes with advertisements on YouTube. With YouTube being a business, thousands of people run online video companies and channels on the site as a career, which is done in no small part to advertisements. So when authoring content online, having advertisements creates a barrier between the user and your content on some instances. With the fast moving mentality of the current user generation, a 30 second ad on a video can be enough to make you click off, move on to another video or lose interest altogether. Advertisement is a necessary instrument on YouTube as a business, and allows authors to create revenue through their content. However it is challenging for the general users who many are just looking for a fast moving viewing experience that they don’t get with television. So as much as advertisements are necessary to Youtube, they can create a constraint between the user trying to view the video and the authors content.
Another constraint affects the authors of content more than the general users, which comes with getting viewed on YouTube. YouTube isn’t just the largest place to view videos online, but also to be an author of online video content. This fact creates an extremely competitive market of content, and creates a major challenge of getting your content viewed on a wider scale. When you are dealing with a daily flood of content produced, finding an audience is no simple task, in fact according to Statistic Brain, there are over ‘300+ hours’ of video content uploaded to YouTube every minute. So to be a content author on YouTube means you are battling over 400,000 hours of content every day, let alone the billions of hours that already exist on YouTube currently. On top of that to deal with advertisements, building a network and creating a business plan, building an audience is no easy task. YouTube does allow outside social media sharing (i.e. Facebook and Twitter), however that then relies on an already existing strong social media presence. It can create a base for your content, but the challenge of competing with other YouTubers, who are getting up to millions if not billions of views on their channel’s content, still remains. Though, there are no other video sharing platforms, that even allow authors to get this much reach. So though getting viewed can be looked at as a constraint, the ability to get viewed on a wide scale is another affordance to the site.
Online video has become synonymous with YouTube, the world’s most popular video sharing platform due to its peerless reach. The platforms sheer size and high profile makes it the obvious consideration for hosting videos however, there are many other video hosting sites that exist and offer valuable features that YouTube does not. When it comes to evaluating the pros and cons of YouTube in comparison to other sites such as Vimeo, there are a few notable points.
YouTube has over a billion users, that is, roughly one-third of all people on the Internet. Every day, people watch millions of hours on YouTube, generating billions of views (YouTube, 2017). Whilst this is an enormous attraction, allowing the YouTube community to share your video with people all over the globe and potentially send it viral, it is easy for user’s content to get lost amidst the sea of videos that are published every day. On the contrary, Vimeo reaches a much smaller range of people with 170 million viewers worldwide (Advertise on Vimeo, 2017). Although content published to Vimeo may not reach a large audience, the site generally has a more quality feel and higher quality content allowing video producers to customise their videos to suit their style or brand.
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Essentially, YouTube is a social network site. Video content has become the main vehicle of communication and the leading measure of social gathering. Users who spend time on the website contributing content, discussing it, building on and critiquing each other’s videos, as well as collaborating with one another establish YouTube’s ‘social core’ (Burgess, 2009). This social network whilst in some perspectives is an advantage, is also the fabric for a variety of cons related to the website such as lack of control over content, user’s comments detracting from producer’s videos and the way in which YouTube displays advertisements and other users content near yours. Contrastingly, Vimeo has upheld a no advertising stance. The platform predominantly focuses on hosting premium services and avoiding annoying ads that disrupt audience’s viewing experience.
Despite this advertisement-free service that Vimeo offers, providing a professionally focused approach with a greater number of features comes at a cost for users. Whilst Vimeo can be used for some personal content free of charge, large projects that are business related require a paid membership plan. YouTube however, is completely free with unlimited hosting and full HD quality videos. Although the playback quality of YouTube videos may be of a high standard, it is Vimeo that favours higher quality in the content itself.
Through analysing the pros and cons of YouTube and one of its competing online video hosting platforms Vimeo, it is evident that there is great variety and options for content producers online. Whether a user has a professionally made video being used for business purposes or have produced a simple home-made style video, there are sites across the internet to cater for all ranges of video content.
YouTube is not only the largest space online for authoring and viewing video content, but is also one of the largest sites online altogether. The many affordances of the site allow its user to continually view large amounts of content of all genres, as well as being an accessible space for authors to publish content and create revenue is what has done this. Though the site, like any other, is not without its constraints in terms of user frustration and authors getting their content viewed on a larger scale. Comparing and contrasting YouTube to other video websites sees platforms such as Vimeo allow for a smaller viewer base and have a community/social voice and create a totally different sort of author and user environment.
References
- Christen Dominique 2016, FULL COVERAGE GLAM MAKEUP TUTORIAL, YouTube, 17 August <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1g92Xghz-8> [Accessed 02 June 2017]
- Invisible Children 2012, KONY 2012, YouTube, 5 March <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc&t=75s> [Accessed 02 June 2017]
- Advertise on Vimeo 2017, Advertise on Vimeo. [ONLINE] <https://vimeo.com/about/advertisers> [Accessed 02 June 2017].
- Burgess, J 2009, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Digital Media and Society). 1. Polity.
- YouTube 2017, Statistics — YouTube . [ONLINE] <https://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html.> [Accessed 02 June 2017].
- YouTube Company Statistic. Published by Statistic Brain. Sep 1st, 2016. <http://www.statisticbrain.com/youtube-statistics/> [Accessed 04 June 2017]
